Player grades, Games 61-70: Edmonton Oilers picked up their play but playoff berth remains a pipe dream

For some weeks now I’ve been hanging on to the “faint hope” version of the Edmonton Oilers’ playoff chances. The club’s previously-demonstrated capacity to put together decent strings combined with the lacklustre showing by their rivals in the Western Conference wild card race left the window open a crack. I thought (and think) the Oilers were correct in not shipping out players for picks at the deadline, even as I also thought it correct that they not sell the farm for rentals either. In my ongoing analogy of the long regular season to a single game, when you’re trailing by 3 goals midway in the third period, you don’t call off the dogs and run your bottom six the rest of the way, but neither do you pull your goalie with 10 minutes left. Just play it straight up and give your players a chance to make a game of it.

And for a while there, the Oilers did just that. For the third time this season they rattled off a stretch of 7+ wins and 15+ points in a 10-game span, going 7-2-1 from Games 60-69. Those earlier stretches (8-2-1 from Games 3-13 and 8-1-1 from Games 24-33) don’t line up perfectly with the 10-game segments we review eight times a season here at the Cult of Hockey, but the three hot rolls are largely embedded within Segments 1, 3 and 7 shown below.

Which would be fine had the team been able to tread water in between times. Alas it’s been feast or famine for much of the season, notably an extended drought of 26 games which saw the team win just 6 times while enduring three different losing streaks of 5+ contests.

The recent run is nice, but it’s nowhere near hot enough to overcome the gap. Trouble is, their competition in the previously moribund wild-card race has gotten hot as well. Hotter, in fact, and for longer. The St. Louis Blues ran off 11 straight wins at one point and now sit 10 points clear of Edmonton in the first wild card position. Arizona Coyotes, meanwhile, have won 13 of their last 17 to surge into the second, and last, wild card spot, 8 points ahead of the Oilers. Three other teams — Minnesota, Colorado, Chicago — are wedged in between, all of whom have posted 11 or 12 points in their last 10. The Oil have 13 in the same span, after getting pounded 6-3 on their own ice by a glorified version of Utica Devils in Game 70. That’s enough to gain ground on also-rans Vancouver, Anaheim and Los Angeles, all of whom have 8 points or fewer in their own last 10, but to make the playoffs in the Western Conference you have to be better than seven other teams, not just three.

The Oilers get one last kick at the can on Saturday when they go head-to-head against the Coyotes in Glendale, but even an outright win would leave them 6 back with just 11 to play and the odds still stacked hugely against them. A loss in that game is the equivalent of giving up a late goal when already trailing by 3, basically game over and let’s play out the clock in garbage time. Much as it pains me to say it.

Individually over the last 10 games:

(Adapted from NHL.com. Team leaders circled in orange.)

His most recent game aside, Mikko Koskinen responded well to the challenge of being Edmonton’s undisputed #1 stopper. In a segment where the Oilers allowed more than 35 shots per game, Koskinen held the opposition to 2 goals or fewer in 6 of his 9 start and posted a save percentage north of 92% in 7 of them, all of which produced at least 1 standings point.

The return of Andrej Sekera from a season-long injury played a significant role in stabilizing the defence corps. The Top 4 all continued to play north of 20 minutes a night, while the more sheltered third pairing of Sekera with Matt Benning produced excellent outcomes in terms of outscoring, be that measured in +/- (shown here) or 5v5 Goals For %. Those strong goals results were hardly a fluke, being built on by far the d corps’ best underlying numbers (Corsi, Fenwick, shot share, scoring chances). Worth noting also that the Oilers were able to use the same 6 defenders for every game in this segment, this in a season that has seen 13 different blueliners wearing the Oil drop at some point. These 6, all holdovers from the successful 2016-17 campaign, are unquestionably the best group available, and the club’s results during their now 12 games together (7-3-2) give a hint of what might have been.

Two players towered above the pack, with both Leon Draisaitl and Connor McDavid 10 points clear of any other Oilers forward during the last 10, the first 2 of which McDavid missed due to suspension. Productive all along, both players have had so-so defensive results for much of the campaign, but that certainly hasn’t been a problem of late with both posting a solid +7 during the stretch. (Helps that the Oilers didn’t allow any empty net goals for a change.) Both continue to log absolutely massive minutes as they do their level best to drag the team in their wake.

The third member of the Big Three, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, struggled through his most unproductive stretch of the season, with his 0 assists standing in stark contrast to his previous average of 6 per 10 games. Related: Oilers’ powerplay struggled with just 4 goals in the 10 games, while opponents scored 7 PPG.

The rest of the crew provided a smidgen of secondary scoring within the rest of the top 6, and a whole lot of not much from further down the depth chart. Nothing (new) to see here.

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Player grades

We close in our usual fashion by reviewing the last ten games through the lens of our own subjective ratings here at the Cult of Hockey. Regular readers will know that we grade on a scale of 1 to 10, the performance of every Edmonton Oilers player in every game the team plays, based on a combination of observation and interpretation of statistical output. Here are average grades for Games 61-70 along with our customary thumbnail comment summarizing each player’s contribution over that span:

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